Double Relay Communication Protocol with Power Control for Achieving Fairness in Cellular Systems

Abstract:

The growing demand for wireless connectivity has turned bandwidth into a scarce resource that has to be carefully managed and fairly distributed to users. However, the variability of the wireless channel can severely degrade the service received by each user. The Double Relay Communication Protocol (DRCP) is a transmission scheme that addresses these problems by exploiting spatial diversity to enhance the fairness of the system without requiring any additional infrastructure (i.e relay nodes or a backhaul connection). Although DRCP has originally been proposed to work without channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT), in this paper we study how the performance of DRCP can be further improved through power control when CSIT is available. Our approach provides the highest fairness and the largest minimum spectral efficiency for most conditions compared to other studied baseline approaches.